The present invention relates generally to instruments for evaluating tissue samples in medical pathology, and in particular to a device that characterizes tissue samples using precise measurements of electrical impedance of the tissue.
The diagnosis of cancer and other diseases is often made by the examination of tissue samples removed from the patient during a biopsy or surgical procedure. The tissue sample may be preserved chemically and then stained and sliced into layers that are on an order of one to several cells in thicknesses. These sections are examined by a pathologist who may study these sections under a microscope to reach a conclusion about whether the tissue is cancerous.
The above process may take substantial time to complete and therefore an alternate procedure called a “frozen section” may be used that eliminates the step of chemical preservation and encases the specimen in plastic and freezes the specimen. This process can be accomplished in less than an hour, but requires considerable skill. Further the resulting sections provide lower resolution images, and therefore must often be followed by a conventional chemical preservation process described above.
In both of these techniques, only small sections of tissue may be analyzed and accordingly many adjacent sections must often be studied to definitively diagnose the disease in an organ.